phainomena

PAULO DE JESUS
finger, through drawing of one’s blood, to self-monitoring by being sensitive to
changes in one’s body. In contrast to perspectivalism, these various practices
are not merely different epistemic ways of getting at a singular static entity;
rather, they all constitute an ontologically different entity that is given the label
“hypoglycemia”. The focus is no longer on the many ways an entity can be
known, but rather on the many ways it is enacted.
This analysis highlights two important points for our current discussion:
(i) specific modes of enactment stand or fall only by virtue of the active
presence of other agents, medical devices, context-specific practices, modes
of self-monitoring, and so forth. This means that organisms do not only enact
practices but are themselves enacted by them. Further (ii) by virtue of the
many ways that hypoglycemia is enacted in diverse settings, various medical
practices and settings enact different versions of this “entity”. Mol and Law
are at pains to stress that, while they record blood samples, sugar levels, and
accounts of lifestyles, these do not refer to any one specific stable “entity”.
Hypoglycemia is not divided into objective or subjective layers, it is not
taken to be some static entity within biological bodies nor a particular set of
embodied phenomenal experiences of a subjective body. Rather, it involves
both as it is enacted through the practice of measuring blood sugar levels, the
devices and technologies that enable it, the staff who take the readings and
documentation, and so forth. The point is that only in the multiple interrelation
of these entities that a specific hypoglycemic body emerges. As this case of
hypoglycemia illustrates, particular bodies are “brought into being” and the
production and enactment of these bodies is intimately connected to the
sociocultural practices, techniques, and artefacts that make different bodies
possible.
To conclude our discussion, we can now see that sense-making is clearly
distinct from enactment. The essential difference, as we have seen, is that
the notion of enactment is an ontological concept, while sense-making and
hence embodiment, according to our analysis above, turns out to be an
epistemic concept. The body and embodiment turn out to be specific epistemic
perspectives taken by the AE theorists on “the body”. As such, history and
sociality are epistemic “layers” added to an unexplored ontological core.
In contrast, the notion of enactment as introduced here shifts the focus
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